Chris Groves – Diving all the way to the Suez Canal

Well I took Splendid as a Navigator out to the Far East and then we came back from the Far East …

Simon: Suez Canal as well. That’s on the surface you go through or was it …

Yes, on the surface. You can only do it on the surface through the Suez Canal, but we did … literally as we left Faslane, the first place that you can realistically dive is at the Cumbrae Gap, which is the entrance to the Clyde Estuary, the Clyde River, and we dived there and we did not surface again until we were dressed off north of the Suez Canal, so we dived transit all the way down through the Irish Sea, all the way down past Portugal and Spain and through the Straits of Gibraltar, dived all the way down through the Straits of Messina and we surfaced off the Suez Canal.

The Captain was absolutely adamant that we were going stay dived and at any time we could be dived and so I can remember surfacing and then again when we got to the south side of the Suez Canal, as soon as we were clear of the navigation channel, we were dived again and we dived down through the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb and down past Aden and off to Diego Garcia, and we didn’t surface until we were a mile off Diego Garcia.

Simon: And the reason to do that was because no one knows where you are or just because you could, or …

Because that’s how submarines should transit. You know they’re called submarines for a good reason. And nuclear submarines particularly, you can do the speed and transit at reasonable speeds in a nuclear submarine in a way that you probably didn’t do in a diesel submarine.